On Reading Jane Jacobs...Finally

A planner who quoted Jane Jacobs for years finally discovers what the author really said in her classic book.

1 minute read

July 19, 2006, 10:00 AM PDT

By Christian Madera @http://www.twitter.com/cpmadera


"Despite the fact that I consider myself a hard-core urbanist steeped in the gospel of Jane Jacobs, until recently I had never actually read her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities..."

"I decided to read itâ€"really read itâ€"about a year ago, after New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff pinned opposition to developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards megaproject in Brooklyn on "acolytes of urbanist Jane Jacobs." Predictably I didn’t sit down with the book until after Jacobs died in April."

"The Jacobs I thought I knewâ€"an advocate for small-scale thinking and an opponent of large-scale projectsâ€"is not the one I discovered when I actually began to read her text."

Thanks to ArchNewsNow

Monday, July 17, 2006 in Metropolis Magazine

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